OpenIndiana 2017.04 Hipster Released

At STH, we have a great forum community using OpenIndiana, a successor to OpenSolaris. Since it is Solaris derived, there is a community that uses OI for ZFS storage servers for example. The popular napp-it ZFS storage web GUI can be used atop OI to make administration of Solaris derived ZFS a breeze. The new OpenIndiana 2017.04 “Hipster” release is now live. The biggest changes in this release are around hardware support. As a smaller project using the OpenSolaris base, hardware support generally lags Linux and Windows so this is welcome news.

Key Changes in OpenIndiana 2017.04 Hipster

Here are the notable changes from the release notes:

The most notable change for this snapshot is related to hardware support. OI now fully supports USB 3.0 devices. Intel Video drivers were significantly improved by Gordon Ross. The list of supported hardware has significantly extended (see https://wiki.openindiana.org/oi/Intel+KMS+driver)

Xorg was updated to 1.18.4 version, so if you use any third-party modules – they might need recompilation or update (notably, the VirtualBox Guest Additions).

Mate was updated to 1.16 version. We started shipping GTK3 applications. Several Gnome 2 applications, which don’t have Mate analogs, were updated to Gnome 3 versions. A lot of end user applications are delivered now as 64-bit only.

Installer no longer creates the classic auto_home layout, as it was a source of confusion to the users. Default home filesystem is created under rpool/export/home now. Old-school users or those with more complicated setups are free to set up the legacy configuration in their systems, the functionality is still there.

We thoroughly tested IPS and imported several upstream fixes. Now IPS uses Apache 2.4 as its internal web server.

GNU TLS 3.4 is the default TLS implementation now. We also introduced ca-certificates service to regenerate the CA bundle.

Notice: on some resource-constrained systems ca-certificates service can fail to start immediately after system install. Later SMF takes care and restarts it, but you can see error messages on first boot. The issue is being investigated.